PulseAudio sound issues

[Alejandro Santos <listas@alejolp.com>]

Hi,

I'm using Debian "Wheezy" Testing on both my desktop computer and my
Laptop. On the Laptop the sound works fine, but on the desktop I can't
play two or more sounds at the same time, for example while watching a
video on VLC, hitting pause, then opening a video on YouTube.

Other problem is: after watching a video on VLC and closing VLC, I
have to wait 20 seconds to open a new VLC program since otherwise the
sound coming out of the speakers will be garbage.

Since after killing the PulseAudio daemon with pulseaudio -k the
problems goes away, it is my strong opinion that this is a PulseAudio
issue.

My workaround so far was to remove the execution permissions on
PulseAdio with: chmod a-x /usr/bin/pulseaudio

I have two questions:

1. How can I debug this problem? I'd like to file an appropiate bug on
the corresponding bug tracker.

2. I can't purge the package with "aptitude purge pulseaudio" since
the package "pulseaudio" is a dependency on "gnome-core". After
killing PulseAudio, the sound works fine. I'm a software developer
myself, and I can't help keep asking myself, why is PulseAudio an
strong dependency on Gnome? What advantages does PulseAudio gives me
as a user over good ol' ALSA?

-- 
Alejandro Santos